Under the Stars with Fine Arts

LYNCHBURG, VA – On Saturday April 20, 2019, students on campus will be getting ready for the Fine Arts Formal. Beginning at 8:00 p.m. and running until 12:00 a.m., musicians, artists, actors, and other students will be spending a ‘night under the stars’ together as per the theme, Clair de Lune. Tickets will be $5.00 each for the event. The group heading the planning and execution of the formal is the professional music fraternity on campus, Mu Phi Epsilon.

Zerai Thornton, treasurer and chorister for the fraternity, is also the head of the Fine Arts Formal Committee. “I really wanted to be involved with this process and volunteered to be the committee head to Thomas,” she said, Thomas Cass being the president of Mu Phi.

Thornton and the rest of her committee have been working alongside the Art Club, as well as Alpha Psi Omega, the theater fraternity on campus. She indicated the formal took a good deal of planning among all of the groups involved, especially when it came to making sure things were done in a reasonable manner. For example, the Art Club is making some of the needed decorations, as well as establishing a playlist for the dance itself. According to Thornton, the biggest challenge was making sure that they were able to set goals for the formal – making it affordable as well as a reasonably doable event in the long run.

Persephone Huff-Williams is a member of the Art Club, who is also vice president and historian for Mu Phi. Huff-Williams has been a part of the Art Club in making their decorations, as well as creating and distributing promotional material for the event. She is also assisting Thornton in meeting deadlines, “and doing everything I can to keep everybody involved doing what they need to do on time.”

As the Historian of Mu Phi, Huff-Williams got the newsletter committee involved too – in fact, there was a section about it in their March newsletter. For her, the best part is seeing all the faces at formal, new and old. This event is something of a celebration; it is a time meant to spend time together and have fun without other immediate obligations.

Mu Phi Epsilon, along with Alpha Psi Omega and the Art Club, hope that this event will help promote the arts on campus and encourage people to get involved.

For more information about the formal, please contact Zerai Thornton at thornton_z@lynchburg.edu.